Oh what a tangled web... of Real Estate Listings we weave

In working on listings for my folks site, I came across trulia.com some time ago. This is a site where you can automatically provide a feed in xml format, and assuming that your site is capable of dynamically refreshing the feed when trulia hits it, your listings will always be on Trulia, and always be up to date. Google has a similar xml input feed you can provide to their Google Base, but unfortunately they expire your input every 30 days or so and you have to go and give them a new file manually, so it's not quite as nice as Trulia from my perspective.

Anyway, while working to load listings to Trulia, I noticed that some of our listings were already there from a site called point2homes. This is a site that's done by the same company (I think - don't quote me on this) that does the Remerica Corporate website, and will give agents a personal page in point2homes for an additional $10 per year, and load their listings in.

Now my mother had already mentioned to me sometime back that she had problems with duplicate listings at realtor.com. That's because being at the corner of three counties we put our listings into three separate MLS systems, all of which feed into realtor.com. I'm not sure if realtor.com fixed this problem yet or not, but all of this got me to thinking about all the different places I've seen these listings being sent to and from. I wondered if other realtors were experiencing similar spaghetti journeys with their listings, or even knew where their listings were headed in cyberspace.

I thought I'd leave you with the following graphic to emphasize this crazy interconnection of listing sites. If this is the future of Real Estate Listings on the Internet, then two questions come to mind.
1.) How are we going to prevent duplicates?
and
2.) what will be the future of the MLS sites if the listings are so freely available everywhere?

Food for thought, or something like that.

5 Questions To Ask About Your Real Estate Web Site

I attended codemash in Sandusky Ohio a couple of weeks ago, and it was quite good. Hats off to my friend Darrell Hawley for doing a great job with the registrations. I particularly liked "The World is Dynamic"keynote presentation by Bruce Eckel. He had lot's of photo's from Burning Man and made an analogy between the art projects that folks undertook there and software projects.

Anyway, codemash got me thinking about what technology information I could relay to interested real estate people. While most of what was presented there was highly technical, I decided that there were still plenty of simple tips that I could be sharing with real estate professionals who might not be internet savy. So without further delay, here are 5 things to ask yourself about your real estate web site.


1. Are your property listings search engine exposed?
That might sound like you need to take your site's clothes off, but what I'm really talking about is, if a search engine spider such as google finds your home page and reads it, can it find the links to take it to all your individual property listing pages. The litmus test to find out is, if you surf your site, can you reach your individual listing pages from the main page just by clicking your mouse, and without typing anything, then your well exposed. If you have to type in criteria and press a submission button, thats a form submission, and search engines will have a tough time finding those listings.


2. Do your listings include a title or short description, and are your page titles optimized for them?
Having a short title thats displayed in a slightly larger font than the main description can really allow the search engines to better determine what your page - and your listing - is all about. It also allows you a spot to emphasize geography or other special keywords that may not be supported by standard fields, such as "Home Near Golf Course For Sale In Somerset Township". Ideally, if this short title is what shows up in the title bar for the page, then it will be the main header on search page results. *Technical Note: Whatever text is between the <title> and </title> tags when the page is displayed constitutes the page title, and its also displayed in the bar at the very top of the browser window.


3. Does your real estate site provide or allow for original content?
Just as cash is king in the real world, content is king in cyberspace. If you purchased a real estate website from someone, and the only content thats provided is listings from an MLS feed, then you can bet that those listings are also being displayed to many other sites. You need something to differentiate your content. If you can easily add articles and other local commentary or information, then you should take the time to do so, and update or add to it periodically. Also, there are so many good blog softwares on the internet now - I use blogger.com - so writing on a blog site and then publishing it back to your real estate site is another possibility . Ask your real estate site provider if they support rss or atom feeds from other sites.


4. Does your site have any inbound links?
Does your website provider network your site so that other sites have links to it? Are those links good natural links, meaning does the text thats hyperlinked say "yet another real estate website" or does it say "best homes for sale in Jackson County"? Hopefully you get the idea. If you post listings on other free classified sites like backpage and craigslist, you can create your own natural links back to your own site. I'm planning a more detailed article shortly with more detailed descriptions of real estate posting sites. (Note: I used to be able to post natural links on craigslist, but I had an odd note from them recently and haven't had time to check it out, so if anyone finds out otherwise, let me know).


5. Is your email address sufficiently hidden?
Just as it would presumably be desirable to get as much exposure for your listings as possible - items 1,2 and 4 - your email address is another matter. You really don't want to have your email address exposed in plain text on the internet, and if it is, you'll know what I'm talking about already. If your email address can be read off of a page, then sooner or later the spammers will get ahold of it, and you'll be bombarded with junk mail, or spam mail. One way to get around it if you want to advertise your email is to use an image of the address. type it up in microsoft paint, crop it, and save it as a jpg or gif file. Thats not 100 persent safe, since wandering eyes can still read it and abuse it, but it cuts down on junk mail alot. Another solution that most folks are familiar with is to provide a text box for people to submit a message to you. I'm not personally fond of that method - it seems so impersonal and one way - but it does allow people to email you without subjecting your address to spammers.

I hope these tips help to improve your real estate website and sell some property for you.

Using Writely to create HTML Documents for Real Estate Ads

I thought I'd try using Googles writely (Now out under the Google Docs and Spreadsheets umbrella) to create a post. All the color, bold, italic, and hyperlink below were done without knowing the html tags, but rather by using menu items similar to Microsoft Word.

My folks Business is a Southern Michigan Real Estate Company

In addition to working on their webiste, I am also tinkering with a Fun Trivia Site about People

The site also lets me post directly to to my real estate technology blog without having to cut and paste at all, creating even more value for me as a user. Definitely worth a look for both the html challenged, and those who know html but just want to write, and not deal with tags.

If your intersted in posting real estate ads on sites like craigslist and backpage - which allow you to insert the html - you could create the document in the Writely document editor, then select "edit html", and then paste the html into the appropriate spot in your craigslist or backpage ad.

As I have hinted before, more on sites to post free real estate listings on coming soon.

Housing Statistics in the Wall Street Journal Today

There's not much of a technology focus in this article, but significant enough to be worth mentioning.

The Wall Street Journal came out with some housing statistics today (October 9th), complete with graphs that visually demonstrate the tremendous shifts in the market over the last couple of years. It's worth taking a look at the charts if you can get a copy of todays journal. Here are some of these numbers:

Existing Home Sales for August: 6.3 Million - down 12.6% from previous year
(Source: National Association of Realtors)

Median Home Price for August: $217,590 - down 1.8% from previous year
That's DOWN, not UP!!
(Source: National Association of Realtors)

Housing Starts for August: 1.67 million - down 19.8% from previous year
(Source: Commerce Department)

Supply of Homes as of August: 7.5 months - nearly three months longer than the previous year according to the Journal. That means it would take 7.5 months to sell all the homes listed in August, wheras last year it was only around 4.5 months.
(Source: National Association of Realtors)

There are a couple of other numbers in there, but they all indicate a 360 degree shift in the Real Estate market in the last year. For those interested the data is on page C10 (Money and Investing)

Real Estate Investing - Long Term versus Short Term

Up until a year or two ago the Real Estate Market had been doing quite well for sellers for a number of years. Real Estate Prices were steadily climbing across most of the country, and demand from buyers remained strong. This created an ideal market for short term Real Estate Investing, sometimes referred to as "flipping". For investors that know what they are doing, they could often deal in properties with very little of their own money involved, and often make nice profits in a short period of time, mostly from knowing where to go, what to look for, and handling paperwork. Now that the market has shifted so dramaticly, there are - ironicly - more foreclosures available on the market than ever. But there's a problem now with short term investing; you can't be so sure how soon you'll be able to sell it. So if you actually put the title in your name on the deal, be prepared to become a Semi-long term investor for the time being.

For more on this, see the article "How low will real estate go?" by Lacey Rose of Forbes.

Also See the The Real Estate Bloggers for another interesting article about the current real estate market shifts.

The Future of Multiple Listing Services (MLS) and The Internet

In the old days in Real Estate, there were local organizations that realtors congregated to to share their listings. It was a necessity. The Internet was non-existent, and the first computer based systems to share listings were proprietary, and required users to sign up and pay to become members. Thus, the advent of MLS. Many Realtors, especially in rural areas such as where my folks are, still believe that being a member of their local MLS system to get exposure for your listings is a necessity.

I believe that will gradually change, and here are some reasons why:

Cost - MLS Systems charge a significant amount of money, while there are more and more places on the Internet where you can post listings for free - I've mentioned that before and I'll be back later with another articel on my favorite hit list.

Monopoly - May of these MLS systems operate form a business model of "No competition". For example, if you want to deal Real Estate in Hillsdale Michigan youhave to be part of the SWMRIC MLS. Period. Which brings me to my next sticking point. Service. This tends to cause these systems to be less driven to provide better service and site functionality. Some MLS Systems won't allow access to the general public at all, and do things like prevent you from downloading photos.

Discontinuity - With My folks Real Estate Office, they are in a geographic area that requires them to become members of 3 separate MLS systems for 3 counties. Two of those systems are from the same company, so they effectively have to pay twice to use the same software.

Data Feeds - These systems allow members to receive and post all listings on their own personal sites, but I've looked at the format that some of the data currently comes in and its pretty rough. Zipped excel files. XML is they way they need to start going with this stuff to stay competitive. Also, when you sign up, current rules allow other realtors (at least in Michigan) to post your listings next to a nice big picture of them, only crediting that actual listing in the fine print. These are typically public Internet websites and many end consumers don't realize that the real listing agent is way down below in the fine print. Now why would I want my listings in a system like that?

Lack of Search Engine access - Most MLS Systems themselves can't be crawled by search engines, so you won't find listings from MLS systems by looking on Google.

In short, I believe in time - and it may take a while - more and more realtors are going to start seeing and believing in other Internet advertising strategies, and unless local MLS systems get more effective and competitive, they'll either go by the wayside, or get swallowed by the MLS Systems that do a better job of competing.

For an example of how the Internet is slowly begining to fundamentally change the Real Estate Market, see this article by Nick Karris at Gomez.com